Our CSA (Root Down Farm) started pick up in June and I’ve been bringing home lots of wonderful veggies. Today was the first day the u-pick section was open and I brought home my first flowers of the year. Aren’t they beautiful?

The CSA moved its pickup and U-pick location this year and they are right down the street from the family farm. My family farm that is. My great-grandfather was a farmer. My grandfather and his brother took over the business and turned it into a successful greenhouse business, which is now run by my uncle.  The CSA is on land that was owned by a neighboring farm/greenhouse family. It’s kind of funny for me to go there, so close to where I spent so much time as a child. The home my great-grandparents lived in, where my grandfather was born and where my grandparents and my mother lived is a stone’s throw down the street from the CSA pick up. It’s kind of nice to be back in the neighborhood, noodling around in the fields, picking flowers like I used to do with my grandmother.

We’ve had many delicious CSA items this year. I’m loving the peas most of all. I love to eat them raw, out of the shell for lunch. We’ve had lots of garlic scapes so I’ve been making lots of sauces and pestos and freezing much of it. I bring home lots of greens to feed my son’s tortoise (kale and collard greens). Zucchini, cucumbers,  and squash are wonderful. For a few weeks there were radishes and salad turnips, which I am not a fan of. Napa cabbage has been coming home the past two weeks so I think I’ve got to make some sweet and sour cabbage with it or maybe a stir fry. And there is always plenty of lettuce and salad greens. This week’s newest item is purslane, which I’ve never cooked with. I think I might make some soup with it.

I love going each week and being surprised by what’s there.

While I was in the U-pick field today I also picked a bunch of basil (in the front in my photo) since someone is nibbling on mine in my herb garden! My parsley has also completely disappeared. I suspect the rabbits have been at work.

Our CSA (Root Down Farm) started pick up in June and I’ve been bringing home lots of wonderful veggies. Today was the first day the u-pick section was open and I brought home my first flowers of the year. Aren’t they beautiful? The CSA moved its pickup and U-pick location this year and they are … Read more →

We signed up for a CSA for the first time this year. The idea is you buy a “share” from the farmer and then each week you go and pick up your portion of that week’s harvest. I was lucky enough to find Root Down Farm, which is 15 minutes from my house and which grows everything organically. Now that the CSA season is ending, it’s time to evaluate it.

What I Didn’t Expect

Friends who use CSAs talk about what’s in their “CSA box” each week. We didn’t get a box. Instead, we went to a little covered hut and each week there was a white board telling us how much we could take. Usually there was one wall of vegetables and then one wall of greens, and then bins of tomatoes, squash or melons. Most weeks we could mix and match anything we wanted on the veggie wall to fill up a plastic grocery store shopping bag (I know: I’m still not over an organic CSA distributing plastic bags). So although there might be things on that wall I didn’t want (eggplant, hot peppers, kohlrabi), I could fill my bag with anything else, so I appreciated that flexibility.

What I Loved

I loved the freshness of the food. A bag of lettuce greens would last almost two weeks because it was so fresh. My kids were nuts about the carrots. I loved the potatoes. There were some greens I’d never heard of that I really liked: tat soi and vitamin greens.

I liked that this encouraged me to try new things. I always took things that were new to me to try at least once, something I would not do in a grocery store.

Everything tasted better to me because it was organic and it was super fresh. This made everyone more likely to eat it. I’ve never seen my children get excited about vegetables before, and every Monday they would come home and ask what we got at the CSA. There were squabbles over the carrots (who would get to take them in their lunch).

I loved the U-pick part of our CSA, particularly the cutting flowers section. They had a nice selection of herbs in U-pick as well, but I planted an herb garden this year, so I didn’t use those.

I felt as though the price I paid for the share was a good bargain.

What I Didn’t Love

There was some disorganization happening at times. My mom went to pick up my share when we were out of town and although I told the farmer this was happening, my mom still felt as though they were rude to her when she came and looked unfamiliar. There was also a mix-up about a payment that still bothers me.

It was at times hard to keep up with the food that came home. I was drowning in tomatoes and I threw out a lot of greens, which made me feel terrible.

I did not enjoy having to pick my own beans in the U-pick section. I would be happier if those were picked and part of the share.

Somehow I don’t feel as though my weekly grocery bills went down as much as I would have liked and I don’t quite know why that is.

I had to be sure to plan my grocery shopping around the CSA. If there was no lettuce that week and I had just been to the store and didn’t buy lettuce, then there was no salad! But if I bought lettuce at the store then went to the CSA and there was lettuce, I had another problem on my hands.

Will We Join Again?

The answer to that is a resounding yes. I plan to sign up again next year. I also signed up for a winter share, the details of which still has my husband twitching. For $100, we are getting 100 lbs of winter vegetables in one pick up in November, and it will include things like cabbage, squash, pumpkin, carrots (my kids will be happy), potatoes, beets, etc. I’ll post once we pick that up and figure out how the heck we will store it!

So, overall, the CSA experiment was a great success and I highly recommend it to everyone!

We signed up for a CSA for the first time this year. The idea is you buy a “share” from the farmer and then each week you go and pick up your portion of that week’s harvest. I was lucky enough to find Root Down Farm, which is 15 minutes from my house and which … Read more →